Significant results of scientific activity in year 2017

Single crystals of Cs₂HfCl₆ have recently been identified as promising scintillating material. Furthermore, extended first-principles calculations of Cs₂HfCl₆ electronic and optical properties have been reported, which, among others, indicate the self-trapping of holes and electrons in the form of VK and polaron centers, respectively. Renewed interest in halide scintillators appeared in the late 1990s when rare-earth-based...

In this work, we demonstrate and describe an effective method of protecting zirconium fuel cladding against oxygen and hydrogen uptake at both accident and working temperatures in water-cooled nuclear reactor environments. Zr alloy samples were coated with nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) layers of different thicknesses, grown in a microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition apparatus. In addition to showing that such an NCD layer prevents the Zr alloy from directly...

Unknown quantum information cannot be perfectly copied (cloned). This statement is the bedrock of quantum technologies and quantum cryptography, including the seminal scheme of Wiesner’s quantum money, which was the first quantum-cryptographic proposal. Surprisingly, to our knowledge, quantum money has not been tested experimentally yet. Here, we experimentally revisit the Wiesner idea, assuming a banknote to be an image encoded in the polarization states of single...

The generation of uniformly dense and uniformly heated high-density plasmas created sufficiently rapidly so as to prevent significant hydrodynamic motion during their diagnosis has long been a goal in the field of laser-matter interactions, as such plasmas would provide an environment to make benchmark tests of several fundamental optical, thermodynamic, and transport properties of strongly coupled matter which are important for furthering our understanding of systems...